Zippo

 

  I was on Fan Story today reading some posts by various authors that I follow when I read one by a friend named Jim Wile. He's writing a book about a fellow who finds himself working on some innovative idea to miniaturize a camera to assist people who have dyslexia. For reasons beyond my comprehension, I was reminded of an incident that occurred back when I was in Great Lakes Illinois at Radarman "A" school.

A whole bunch of us had flunked out in the third or fourth week during a class on maneuvering boards.  They were basically just sheets of paper with concentric circles about an inch apart. A circle of course consists of 360 degrees, and on the paper, each degree had a mark on the outside so that you could get an accurate bearing on a contact on the radar. With the maneuvering board a pair of dividers and a parallel ruler,  you could trace the contact for three minutes, and determine what it's course, speed and closest point of approach would be. Now of course  a computer does it all. I hope they still teach maneuvering board in school, just in case the computers go down.

Anyway, there were about twenty five or thirty of us who had to take the class over. We sat at rows of long desks, one row behind the other. At this point, you may be wondering what  a picture of Zippo lighters has to do with this story. Well, long before Bic or any of the other disposable lighters were on the market, if you wanted to light your cigarettes, you had to use a lighter like  a Zippo, which was the most popular brand. It had like a cotton-like filling that was exposed when you took the bottom half of the lighter off, which you filled with lighter fluid until the cotton was saturated. There was also a wheel up top that ran over a flint that caused a spark which produced the flame.

As we young navy radarman wannabes were busy working out problems on our maneuvering boards, one the guys in my row finished early, and decided to play a prank on one the fellows sitting in the row in front. He taped his Zippo to a yard stick and lit it. Then he slowly moved it to under the poor fellow's butt and held it there for about five seconds before pulling it quickly back. It took a few seconds for the pain to register, and then  the guy in front jumped and looked around, but never discovered the source of his agony. I think it happened several more times before the perpetrator was caught. 

When I think back, it's kind of scary to know that we were the folks who were supposed to be protecting this country. What's even more scary is, who are the clowns protecting us now? God help us.